Conservative Media Show Contempt for Working Class Americans:
Trump’s critique of current American economic policy [is] that international trade and immigration are dispossessing the white working class. . . . There is not, in fact, very much evidence for those claims . . . The nation isn’t your family. Your family is your family. . . . [The idea is immoral] that the white working class has been victimized by outside forces. . . . The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. . . . The white American underclass is thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyCotin. What they need isn’t analgesics. . . . They need real opportunity . . . they need U-Haul. – The Father-Fuhrer – Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State, Kevin Williamson, National Review, 3/28/16
Fact Check: If anyone wanted to depict conservatism as a creed to justify greed and contempt for working class Americans, he could do no better than to cite the article above by Kevin Williamson which appeared in National Review, the flagship journal of American conservatism.
Williamson suggests that mass immigration and free trade, policies which enrich the corporate interests, have little negative impact on U.S. wage earners. One who might disagree on immigration is Harvard economist George Borjas who recently testified before Congress that wage depression caused by immigration amounts yearly to a half-trillion dollar transfer of wealth from workers to businesses.
Conservatives like Williamson call this “free enterprise,” but it is scarcely free to the taxpayers who have to subsidize the low-wage immigrant workforce with public assistance. Immigrant households are much more likely than native-born households to use welfare.
As for “free trade,” many Americans can remember when its proponents conceded that it would terminate U.S. manufacturing jobs, but they told us not to worry because new jobs in high tech would open up for Americans and enable them to earn middle-class incomes. What happened? Tech companies began to import foreign cheap labor for those jobs. Under free trade, U.S. companies have to compete against foreign firms which aren’t regulated by environmental laws, labor laws, and other costly regulations which the U.S. companies have to follow. This may be free trade, but it isn’t fair trade.
Williamson focuses his contempt on the white working class. And certainly this is a group one can attack with impunity and still remain “respectable.” One can be pretty sure that he would never dare say such things about American black and Latino workers, even though mass immigration and free trade have hit them harder than whites.
National Review conservatives often speak in favor of patriotism, but what is patriotism if it doesn’t imply some sense of familial ties to one’s countrymen and some degree of loyalty toward them? What Williamson suggests is that economics trumps everything else, and that fellow citizens only have value to the extent that they are efficient cogs in the market machine. And if not, they can be cast off and replaced.
If anything is a “vicious selfish culture,” it is this variety of conservatism. Williamson is quite off-base by intimating that most Trump supporters are underclass dregs. The strong electoral support he has received shows a wide cross-section of American society. American workers want opportunities mass immigration and free trade are denying them. The moneyed interests and the journalists who front for them should take notice.